Realistic Career Guidance
Adopting solution-focused views and tools
- Coert Visser & Kirsten Dierolf
As coaches and career counselors, we have developed a way of career counseling
we have found to be more realistic, more effective, and more fun. One inspiration
is the work of INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra, whose findings on career
development collide well with our own experiences and preferences. Another very
important inspiration has been the Solutions Focus, an approach to consultancy
we have been using for several years now. We have experienced that this
approach is highly applicable in career guidance, too, which was recently
confirmed by a thesis written by Barbara Steiner (2004). In this article, we would
like to explain how. We hope this will provide you with some useful new views
and tools. This article is built up around four statements.
1. Careers are voyages of discovery
It is more realistic to view a career development as a voyage of discovery or a
journey into the unknown than as planning your route with a predestined route
map. Adopting this more open and dynamic view on careers helps to treat career
guidance as a process of both discovery and choice. In this process you
constantly take small steps forward and find out what suits you and how to
proceed. Professor Ibarra has done extensive research on how effective career
change takes place. She found that it is more realistic and effective to act your
way into a new career than to think yourself into one. In other words, instead of
putting a strong emphasis on analysis and understanding, she argues that it is
wiser to emphasize taking small steps to find out which environments, tasks, and
roles suit you well. Professor Ibarra’s views seem to collide extremely well with
our solution-focused perspective. In her own words:
“The central point is to act more than you reflect. Do not spend a lot of time
introspecting; start acting as soon as you can. It’s not that introspecting isn’t helpful,
but people use that as an excuse not to try things out and you can stay paralyzed for a
long time. I’ve seen people spend a year doing self-assessment or going to coaches
and not trying anything.”
2. Leading the client from behind works best
In our experience, ‘leading the client from behind’ works best. We leave decisions
on the content and the directions of the process to the client and fully respect the
way he or she views his or her situation. Instead of pushing him or her to
conform to a predesigned process, we stand behind the client and open up new
perspectives and possibilities by asking questions. Our questions are designed to
help the client focus on discovering what he or she wants to achieve and aid the
client in finding the resources to get there. In order to be successful, it is best to
work within the framework of the client, therefore we try to use the language of
the client as much as possible and hardly ever introduce new concepts or
theories. A great advantage of this leading from behind approach is that it keeps
the client from becoming dependent of the coach. Of course, there is no one best
way to help people. Each client and each coach has his or her specific
requirements in this sense and forcing generic views or prescriptions upon clients,
we have often found to be fruitless.
3. A strengths focus is more effective than a deficit focus
Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton (2001) claim that to excel in your chosen
field and to find lasting satisfaction in doing so, you primarily need to know and
understand your strengths. It’s really common sense: people won’t hire you
primarily for your weaknesses – why would they?- but for your strengths. So the
career guidance should aim at identifying strengths and at finding out which
particular organizations and jobs specifically need these strengths. Some ideas for
how to identify strengths can be found here.
Jonathan came for career advice saying his situation was rather urgent. He had
been working at a large public transportation company for several years. He had
started as a management trainee and, after that he held several management
jobs. At a certain point, he became restless. He was approaching his fourties and
thought he had to try something different in his career. He had been doing his
current job for about four years then and had been rather successful. In fact, a
large organizational change project he had led had been successfully
implemented. Now, he had run into an executive searcher who asked him to
become managing director of a small consultancy firm. It seemed a good
challenge and promised to be the kind of change he had been looking for. He
decided to take the challenge and had now been in his new job for about three
months. When he came to see us, he had discovered he really hated the job! He
hated working in such a commercial environment and was bored with the fact
that his role did not require him to do much more than to take care of business.
He was sure he needed to get out and find something new. And he asked of us:
”Please help me find a job of which I won’t, again, say after a few months, that it
doesn’t fit me. We helped Jonathan identify his strengths by analyzing his
situations of high performance and Jonathan was able to find out some real
strengths and affinities. In the meantime, he found a job as a coordinator in
calamity suppression. In this management job, he can use his organizational
skills, he really has a chance to manage, and he does not have to work
commercially but instead his work helps to deliver an important public service.
4. Solutions Focus tools are a great supplement
We have found that the tools and attitudes of the Solutions Focus approach are a
great addition to the traditional toolkit of the career counselor (like using
questionnaires, teaching networking skills etc.). In fact, we now mainly rely on
these tools when coaching people in their career, and we can fully integrate the
solutions focus and the traditional tools. For example, we use questionnaires that
are entirely solution-focused or we help the client evaluate his or her application
interviews in a solution-focused manner. As main solution-focused tools we would
like to mention:
•
Scales. The coach asks the coachee to imagine a scale from 0 to 10. The 10
stands for the situation in which the coachee has fully achieved his or her
goals; the 0 stands for the situation in which the problem happens at its
worst. The coach asks the coachee where s/he is now on that scale and what
this point at the scales means to him/her. Next, the coach asks the client
what the situation would look like when he or she is on the next step of the
scale. The focus is on taking small steps forward. Step-by-step progress is
made. Small steps are generally less risky, require only minimal effort but
their effects can be large because they often unexpectedly start off a chain of
positive events. Scaling can be applied to lots of things, we mostly use them
as:
1. Scale of progress: to visualize and keep the focus on progress toward the
goal of the career guidance
2. Scale of motivation: to find out which context is necessary to keep up the
motivation of achieving that goal
3. Scale of confidence: to find out what will make the client confident that he
or she is able to achieve that goal.
•
Coping questions: clients in a career guidance process sometimes are
emotional about the situation they’re in. For instance, when they are in an
outplacement process because their job has been eliminated or when they are
confused about what they want to do with their lives. A basic skill of the
career counselor or coach is to help clients deal with their situation and the
emotions that can be triggered by it. Here coping questions have proven very
helpful. This is a “standard” example of a coping question: “Considering what
you are going through, how do you manage to keep on going?” The effect of
this question usually is that people start becoming more aware of reasons to
go on and be strong and find resources to do so.
•
Miracle question (and variations on this). The miracle question asks the client
to describe in detail how his situation would be if a miracle had happened in
the night and the problems he now faces had been solved without his noticing
at night. Inviting the client to visualize what exactly his or her life would look
like, once a solution has been found often helps people find out what’s
important to them, provides new hope to a better future, and starts a positive
chain reaction.
•
Positive exceptions: this tool uses the fact that problems are not continuously
present, that there are always exceptions to the problem, situations in which
the problem is not happening, or to a lesser extent than usual. Positive
exceptions can be used to help the client identify strengths, but also to
identify tasks, contexts, and roles that really suited him or her well.
Conclusion: 5 advantages
We have found that adopting these views and methods have drastically improved
our career guidance work and made it more fun, too. As most important
advantages, we would like to mention the following: First, as coaches we have
become better, we produce better results for our clients. Second, we usually
achieve this faster. Third, our clients become less dependent on the coach and
seem more committed to the results and that makes them stick better. Fourth,
we help client develop their confidence. And fifth, the quality of the working
relationships with clients has improved
References:
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Buckingham, M. & Clifton, D. (2001). Now, discover your strengths. Simon & Schuster
Adult Publishing Group
Creelman, D. (2004). Interview: Herminia Ibarra On Changing Career, Changing
Identity. www.hr.com.
Dierolf, K. & Visser, C. (2004). Realistische Karriereberatung. Lernende Organisation.
Institut für systemisches Coaching und Training
Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your
Career. Harvard Business School Press
Steiner, B. (2004). Die eigenen Stärken erkennen und daran glauben, ist der beste
Weg zum Erfolg ... oder über lösungs- und ressourcenorientiertes Coaching im
Outplacmentprozess“. Master's thesis (in press).
Visser, C. & Thissen, M. (2002). Effective managers pay attention to strengths.
www.hr.com.